On August 9, the 2019 Annual Conference of the International Chinese Sociological Association (ICSA) was held at New York University. Nearly 100 scholars from more than 50 universities and institutions around the world shared 87 high-quality papers in 16 sub-forums on immigration, education, intergenerational mobility, housing, gender, marriage and family, health, population aging, Internet and social media, social governance, cultural capital, social capital, etc. MA Gaoming, a post-doctoral student, and Alumna WAN Yifeng (a 2016 graduate student majoring in Labor and Social Security, now a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University) attended the annual conference.

group photo of participants

Dr. MA Gaoming shared his academic report entitled “Cultural Capital in Migration: Educational Inequality of Chinese Migrant Children in Urban Public Schools”. By using the China Education Tracking Survey (CEPS) data, he analyzed the education inequality faced by migrant children in urban public schools in China. The results show that the main reason is the lack of cultural capital.

At the closing ceremony, WAN Yifeng’s paper “When the State Retreats: Work Units, Marital Regulation, and Rising Divorce Rates in China” won the Linnan Graduate Paper Award. By re-constructing the theory of national social engineering, the paper proposes that in the past forty years, the diminishing intervention of state power in the private life of the people has led to the continuous rise of the divorce rate in China.

WAN Yifeng (second from right) won Linnan Graduate Paper Award